Why Do I Hate My Father? Understanding Your Feelings

There are many adult children who struggle with parental relationships; if you believe that you may hate your father, it’s important to ask yourself why. This recognition is the first step towards resolving the relationship or letting it go. When you know why you feel this way, you can begin to answer the question, "What's next?" Perhaps you don't recognize such strong feelings when thinking about your father but you have an awareness that your relationship is not what you would like it to be. This article will cover a few of the possible reasons you might feel that way.

Reasons you may dislike your father

When you ask, "Why do I hate my dad?" you're recognizing that there may be something missing in your relationship with them or that something is not quite right. Being in touch with yourself, your emotions, and whether you feel good is so important for your own mental health and well-being. Let’s explore some factors that cause strains or ruptures in relationships between children, be they sons or daughters, and their fathers.

You feel no connection with your father

Many grown children feel completely disconnected from their fathers. Sometimes, the problem takes root because the father gives too much of their time and energy to their career. If your father abandoned you completely, you may hate them even more. It might seem odd that you can feel so apart from them and at the same time feel deep anger and resentment towards them. Although your father wasn't a part of your daily life, you needed them to fulfill the role of a parent. For whatever reason, they let you down.

We tend to expect mothers to be more emotional and nurturing of their children and for fathers to be more practical. Traditionally, we also tend to consider fathers as providers, and perhaps the disciplinarians. Regardless of the respective roles your parents played in your life, children have a need to feel connected to their parents. In fact, quite surprisingly, research indicates that the absence of fathers is more damaging to children than the absence of their mothers. This suggests that children have an innate need to connect with their fathers.

Because traditional gender roles dictate how men should behave -- i.e. emotionally distant, tough, impenetrable, and detached -- some fathers have more difficulty being emotionally connected to anyone, including their children. Even though these expectations for men are usually supported culturally, they can be extremely damaging.

Anyone can become a parent. There is no pre-test. There is no certification required. There is no education or effective preparation necessary. Just because someone becomes a parent does not necessarily, nor automatically, ensure they are well equipped to serve this critically important role. This is not meant to excuse any father's harmful behavior but to explain it. Children may experience challenges when their fathers are not able to be emotionally available to them during their most vulnerable, formative years.

Your father hurt you when you were vulnerable

Children depend on their parents in every way, at least for several years of their development. In fact, a child's literal dependence upon their parents is such a critical reality that young children, pre-teens, and even older adolescents automatically accept responsibility for neglect or abuse experienced at the hands of their parents. 

As a child, you need your parents to take care of your physical and emotional needs, which you aren't yet equipped to fulfill yourself. You also need to be taken care of with love and compassion. One of a child's most basic needs is to be loved unconditionally. Some fathers have no idea how to do this. If your father hurt you physically or emotionally at the time you most needed them--when you were most vulnerable and trusting of their intentions--it's perfectly understandable that you feel a level of hatred toward them today.

Emotionally abusive parents can leave scars that are just as damaging as physical ones, even though emotional abuse is not tangible. No one should ever make the mistake of believing that emotionally abusive parents are not damaging simply because the negative impacts of their abuse cannot be seen with the naked eye. Sadly, there are many people today who struggle in their everyday lives due to unresolved emotional abuse from their parents during childhood years.

Others created a negative perception of your father within you

Although this reason may seem rare, it does happen, so it's worth looking into. Try to consider your father's characteristics, attitudes, words and behavior as objectively as you can, and think logically about how they treated you. What has your father genuinely revealed to you directly, in both words and action? 

Sometimes, other people have their own reasons for having a poor opinion of our parents. When they are unwise enough to inflict those perceptions onto their children, the children are likely to believe the negative opinions. You may have no reason at all to hate your father if the person putting them down did so out of selfish motives.

Your father didn't respond appropriately to your teen rebellion

Many children go through a period of rebellion during their teenage years. It is a very natural and necessary stage of development in which all adolescents must figure out who they are, separate from both their parents. Sometimes, it can be easy for parents to take rebellion on a personal level or believe that pushback from their teenagers reflects neglectful or poor parenting; in many cases, this simply is not accurate. 

As teens learn and grow, it is natural for them to seek more individualism and freedom, even if their methods of doing so are not always the best. A wise parent knows, or learns, how to respond appropriately so that everyone can come back together when the rebellion (or "individuation stage") has passed. The parents may learn skills to help diffuse arguments. They realize your need to be both independent and accepted. If your father didn't have these skills or know how to manage your rebellion, what could have been a temporary bump in the road might lead to a lifetime of resentment instead.

Sometimes, fathers may believe that authoritarian parenting is the best way to respond to rebellious teenagers. However, many studies have shown that this is simply not the case. In fact, very strict parenting is linked to children who learn how to become sneaky and work around their parents rather than trust them.

Your father hurt someone you love

Any father who is abusive to a child's other parent shouldn't be surprised if their child develops resentment toward them. The same can be true if they hurt anyone who was important in your life. It can be tempting to punish your father out of loyalty, love, care, and respect for your other parent. It can also be very difficult to see a happy parent turned into a sad one because of a father’s actions or mistreatment. At the same time, loving one person well does not require hating the one who harmed them. Healthy parents will want their children to have healthy relationships with their other parents unless attempting to do so places them in potential physical, mental, or emotional danger. A professional counselor can help you figure out if you should move forward with your relationship with your dad, or let it go.

Your father didn’t spend enough time with you

Parental bonding is so important to children, especially during the latter’s formative years of growth and development. When a father is regularly absent, not around, or even preoccupied with mental health conditions such as bipolar disorder, eating disorders, or substance use disorder, this can put children in a very difficult spot. 

Many fathers who work in busy careers, such as politics, business, finance, etc., may not spend as much time with their children as they should. The lack of time can have harmful impacts on the family unit as a whole, potentially influencing children to blame themselves. As kids get older, they may begin to hate or resent absent fathers for not being around more often.

Healing from hatred for your father

Although the hatred of your father may run extremely deep and may even span generations, you shouldn't abandon hope for recovery. Many people have found that consistent therapy sessions with a qualified professional can help resolve feelings of pain, confusion, and hatred toward fathers, in favor of acceptance and understanding. Some of these patients will go on to develop stronger relationships with their fathers, some will engage in further therapy sessions with their fathers, and some will simply move forward, armed with the knowledge that they are not alone, and that their wounds will eventually heal. Regardless, healing and moving forward from hatred for your father are certainly possible.

Therapy services are helpful for hatred of fathers, largely because therapists are equipped with tools to help you get to the root of your feelings -- roots that might be obvious, in the case of people whose fathers abandoned their families, or roots that might be obscure, as may be the case of people whose fathers were seemingly model citizens, who stuck around and provided for their families. Familial relationships are complicated and multilayered, and it is almost impossible to look at them from an unbiased perspective on your own. A therapist can help you peek into your own past and behavioral patterns to determine what exactly requires healing in order to ease the hatred you feel.

Whether you are seeking help specifically for feelings of hatred or you are seeking mental health support for another reason, a therapist will have experience working with people who have similar feelings toward their fathers.

How mental health therapy can help

As seen above, there are myriad reasons why you may feel hatred toward your father, and there’s no shame in choosing to believe your narrative about how your father treated you in the past. With that in mind, it’s important to understand the dangers of carrying around hatred.

For one thing, holding onto hatred can negatively impact your own mental health. Regardless of why you hate your father -- whether this has to do with parental alienation, personal disagreements, etc., -- hatred can greatly impact how you live life.

Therapeutic interventions can work to heal all kinds of relationships. While marriage counseling is the most well-known form of relationship therapy, therapists can be invaluable tools in helping families connect, reconnect, or heal from absences. If you feel hatred toward your father, a therapist can help you determine the most likely cause of your feelings, develop coping mechanisms to handle your feelings in a healthy way, and learn how to mend your relationship, if that is a possible or desired step. 

Therapy delivered by a psychologist in an office setting can be a wonderful tool, as does online therapy; if reconciliation is your goal, your father may be more inclined to discuss ongoing concerns from the comfort of a personal space. Another advantage to online therapy is the ability to schedule appointments during a time conducive to both your and your father’s schedule. For children and parents who live in different towns, or even in different time zones, online therapy platforms like BetterHelp remove many of the barriers that may prevent them from attending therapy sessions together.

Online therapy has proven effective in helping adult children and their parents resolve challenges in their relationships. A recent study investigating the efficacy of online child-parent relationship therapy demonstrated significant improvements in parental acceptance and participation satisfaction with the treatment approach. If you’re curious to learn about other people’s experiences with online therapy, especially when it comes to processing or reconciling negative emotions toward one’s father, read the examples below of reviews from satisfied BetterHelp users.